The Geoffrey Boycott of Australian politics

Rodney Tiffen, The University of Sydney

In 1988, at the nadir of his first disastrous period as opposition leader,
the Bulletin presented John Howard with an unwanted Christmas present.
The cover of the issue for 20 December proclaimed ‘Mr 18%. Why on
earth does this man bother?’ The following year when Andrew Peacock
deposed him in a stunning party room coup, Howard’s leadership credentials
were in tatters. Howard himself did not think a return to Liberal Party
leadership was possible, colourfully describing the prospect as amounting
to ‘Lazarus with a triple bypass’ (Bowers 1989).

Six years later, following the failure of a succession of Liberal leaders—Peacock,
Hewson and Downer, it was a more chastened and cautious Howard who again
assumed the mantle of Opposition Leader. During the 1980s he had boldly
proclaimed that the times suited him, and that he was the most conservative
leader the Liberals had ever had. In the 1987 election, he had proposed
a radical program of cutting government spending and taxes and, despite
the economic pain in the electorate at the time, he lost.

By contrast, Howard’s main aim in the lead up to the 1996 election
was to preach reassurance. No electorally dangerous spending cuts were
canvassed. There would never ever be a GST. Medicare would be retained
and strengthened, and so forth. In light of later debates about Labor
opposition strategies, it should be remembered that in 1996 Howard won
with a classic ‘small target’ campaign. Of course he had the
key element to make that tactic successful—an irretrievably unpopular
government and prime minister.

Howard’s main aim in the
lead up to the 1996 election was to preach reassurance.

Even after his huge victory in 1996, Howard arguably lacked the authority
usually associated with an electorally successful prime minister. In 1998,
the swing against Howard was one of the strongest ever against a government
in its first attempt at re-election. Labor actually won a majority of
the two-party preferred vote, and the Government was only saved by its
success at hanging on to the marginal seats it had won in 1996. In early
2001, pundits had all but universally written him off, after a series
of electoral defeats and consistently disastrous showings in the polls.
Even in the year leading up the 2004 election, under Latham’s leadership,
Labor led for much of the time, and the major parties stood broadly equal
when the election was called.

In sum, we should not over-simplify the electoral record as one of continuing
triumphs. At times his position has been extremely vulnerable and his
political survival has hung by a thread.

On the other hand, Howard stands alongside prime ministers Hawke (1983–91)
and Menzies (1949–66) as the only leaders to have won four successive
elections, and is now the second longest-serving Australian Prime Minister.
The last two elections have—against the trend of Australian elections—seen
a swing towards, rather than away from, the incumbent government. In 2001,
he staged one of the most, if not the most, amazing electoral turnarounds
ever, coming from a seemingly hopeless position early in the year to record
a resounding victory (Gittins 2001). In 2004, he became the first Australian
prime minister since 1977 to win a majority in both Houses.

Nevertheless in the pantheon of Australia’s most electorally successful
leaders, Howard does seem a strange fit alongside Menzies and Hawke. He
does not have their personal charisma. Moreover, although in retrospect
it is easy to downplay the degree of contention during the reigns of successful
leaders, in key respects Howard’s political agenda and outlook are
less clearly in conformity with majority Australian public opinion than
one would expect given his long tenure.

This combination of facts raises two issues—one is how the Government’s
electoral success relates to the constellation of public opinion. The
other is how Howard’s media management skills relate to his success.
This paper argues that Howard has been masterful in framing the perception
of electoral choices and influencing the political agenda, and that an
underestimated source of his political success has been his skill at defensive
spin control.

THE CONSTELLATION OF OPINION AND AGENDA MANAGEMENT

To simplify (and perhaps somewhat distort) a mass of complex and inconsistent
data into a capsule description, Howard does not command majority support
for such major planks of his domestic policies as the GST, Workplace Relations,
stripping back the public sector, privatising Telstra, and supporting
the monarchy. If there is this disjunction between Howard’s view
of society and majority public opinion, how then do we explain his continuing
electoral success?

Howard has pinpointed the marketing
weaknesses of his opponents.

All governments face occasions when they are out of step with majority
opinion on particular issues, especially because public opinion is itself
shifting and inconsistent. Successful governments are typically able to
insulate themselves from the electoral impact of particular unpopular
policies in several ways.

An election is not a referendum on a set of issues but a judgement about
competitors’ capacity to govern. An election, then, is a more general
battle of images than just choosing among a set of policy positions. In
a representative democracy, it is less important that a party’s
position aligns with a voter’s on some particular policy viewpoint—especially
if it has only transient public salience—than the sense that the
voters think the party and its leader are competent, predictable, and
have the range of abilities to deal with coming contingencies. Governments
have an advantage in this contest of images because they are more of a
known commodity, and it is easier to associate the opposition with the
risk of change.

Similarly, electoral politics is about relative not absolute choices.
For many in the electorate their choice represents what they see as the
lesser of two evils rather than a positive and hopeful embrace of the
party they are voting for. So how choices are framed and, in particular,
how one side is able to portray the other are crucial to success.

Howard has pinpointed the marketing weaknesses of his opponents, focusing
upon Beazley’s ‘lack of ticker’ and Latham’s inexperience.
Both parties prefer not just to rest on the appeals of their own policies,
but to contrast them to the alleged disaster their opponents represent.
The 2004 election campaign—despite his several mis-steps and lapses—showed
Howard’s strategic strength. As far as possible, he stayed on message—the
virtue of the Government’s economic management and the fear of higher
interest rates under Labor. Howard showed similar mastery in the conduct
of the republican referendum. The process maximised the No vote against
‘the politicians’ republic’, by combining both those
who wanted to retain the monarchy with those who wanted a popular vote
for president.

In projecting himself, Howard has constructed a consistent persona,
as a traditional Australian identity, someone who is at one with the ‘average’
Australian, and he takes every opportunity to highlight this. Note, for
example, his recent staunch defence of Christmas—and the way the
media lapped it up. Queensland’s Sunday Mail had a headline,
filling half its front page on 18 December 2005: ‘Stop the Rot /
Howard in call to save Christmas’ ‘Prime Minister John Howard
has called for religion to be put back into Christmas’. What concerned
the Prime Minister—and brought this front page headline—was
the lack of ‘nativity scenes in department stores. They seem to
have disappeared in recent years and you have this sort of “oh we
don’t want to offend anybody”’. It is very characteristic
of Howard that he blames multi-culturalism and political correctness rather
than crass commercialism, and the religious expression he wanted to re-introduce
was very undemanding—a matter of decorations rather than, for example,
giving money to charities for the poor.

People may not be excited by
white bread, but nor are they alarmed by it.

Even though few under 70 are likely to embrace most of Howard’s
world view, it is one that does not challenge or threaten many. Labor
frontbencher Julia Gillard described Howard as ‘the political equivalent
of white bread: not very nice or nutritious but you know the next loaf
is going to be the same as the one you bought last week, and the same
as the one you’ll buy in a fortnight’s time’ (Gibson
& Dick 2006). People may not be excited by white bread, but nor are
they alarmed by it.

In an election campaign not all issues are equally important. As always
the party contest is partly one of the relative salience of different
issues, what issues count most with the public at the time they vote.
Although the Howard Government is out of step with majority opinion in
many of its attempts at domestic political engineering, in other areas
it enjoys majority approval—especially in its record of economic
management, where it has overseen continuing growth, low inflation, lower
unemployment and low interest rates. Probably just as important, the Government
has been helped by the rise of a sense of threat, from asylum seekers
and then from terrorism. The Government has an interest in maintaining
the public focus on these issues rather than the domestic agenda.

The attempt to escalate them was most evident in the low road that Howard
took to victory in the 2001 election, the Tampa, children overboard, and
the fusing of the asylum seeker issue with the terrorist threat. The Immigration
Minister, Phillip Ruddock, ‘did whatever he could to create a sense
of panic. In one extraordinary statement he warned—on the basis
of information from an unnamed source—that ‘whole villages’
in the Middle East were ‘packing up’ for the journey to Australia.
‘If it was a national emergency several weeks ago,’ he added,
‘it’s gone up something like 10 points on the Richter scale
since then’ (Browne 2005).

The contrasting agendas were nicely juxtaposed in November 2005. Two
pieces of legislation were dominating the week in parliament, and the
polls showed a neat symmetry between them—on industrial relations,
29 per cent were satisfied and 60 per cent dissatisfied with Howard’s
performance while on terrorism, 62 per cent were satisfied and 30 per
cent dissatisfied (Hartcher 2005b).

At midday on Wednesday, just before the scheduled introduction of this
momentous legislation, Prime Minister Howard called a midday press conference,
in which he said that intelligence just received revealed a serious terrorist
threat. As a result, the existing legislation (already in operation) would
need urgent amendment. The Prime Minister was not asked a question about
industrial relations (Hartcher 2005a, 2005b), and in all subsequent media
coverage terrorism trumped workplace relations. The issue where the government
enjoyed majority popular support displaced the one where it was unpopular.
Whatever the substantial reasons behind the Government’s actions,
it is hard to believe the Prime Minister was unaware of the publicity
advantages of his move.

Howard has a muted style—almost
a one-tone-fits-all sobriety of response.

So, especially at moments of electoral choice, the Government’s
preferred issues have been most salient on the public’s agenda,
and the Prime Minister has managed to project both his preferred self-image
and his preferred image of his opponents fairly consistently. Partly this
comes down to media management skills, and it is to these that we now
turn.

HOWARD’S DEFENSIVE SPIN

The popular and scholarly attention to spin control, public relations
and politicians’ tactics for manipulating the media is misleadingly
lop-sided. There is concentration upon charismatic and inspiring leaders
such as John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. There is concentration on the mixing
of politics and celebrity and the telegenic qualities that make for political
success. There is dissection of immediate tactics such as the manufacture
of photo opportunities and sound bites, and the timing and framing of
news releases. However, there is much less attention to the strategies
and skills of defensive spin, and it is here that Howard excels.

The overall aim of politicians’ attempts at news management is
to maximise the attention to and the impact of positive developments and
to minimise that of negative developments. All parties need defensive
skills because they inevitably face embarrassments and reversals, but
these skills are especially relevant to governments seeking to remain
in office.

Some of Australia’s most flamboyant and otherwise skilful politicians
have not been good at defensive skills, often through being too aggressive,
never willing to concede a point and so increasing rather than decreasing
attention to the damaging actions. Treasurer Keating’s description
of the recession we had to have is perhaps the epitome of a response that
inflames rather than mollifies the critics. Another example was Attorney-General
Gareth Evans. When he was in trouble for authorising spy flights over
Tasmania to ensure the Franklin was not being dammed, he invoked what
he called ‘the streaker’s defence’ that it seemed like
a good idea at the time, thus increasing rather than reducing media coverage.
Such counter-productive invocations by John Howard are difficult to find.
Even in apparent triumph he has a muted style—almost a one-tone-fits-all
sobriety of response—that means also there is little triumphalism
in success that may later become a hostage to fortune. The repertoire
of defensive skills is extensive but some of the key ones follow.

Altering the timing

The Government has been masterful at ensuring that negative news comes
out at moments of least electoral relevance. The story about children
overboard—surely one of the most shameful episodes in Australian
electoral history—(just) remained intact until the 2001 election,
while in February 2002 it was fairly fully exposed by the Senate, with
the Government receiving intense but temporary adverse publicity, at a
time when it had no electoral impact.

The 2004 election had two examples. Official largesse to marginal electorates—low
on policy rationale, high on pork barreling—were not systematically
exposed at the time. Even eight months later the disclosures failed to
gain much media traction, even though it was disclosed that the marginal
Liberal seat of McEwen received sixteen of 27 special sports grants in
the lead up to the 2004 election and a further six went to another problematic
Liberal seat, Makin, in Adelaide (Schubert 2005). Much more central to
the campaign were the Liberals’ promises about the Medicare safety
net, promises which less than six months later were abandoned. Nothing
had changed since the election to justify the breaking of what was by
any standard a ‘core’ promise. Veteran journalist Michelle
Grattan was moved to comment ‘John Howard has treated the voters
with total disdain in hacking into the safety net. He has absolutely no
excuse for breaking an election promise that was repeated over and over,
and formed a central part of his campaign’ (2005a). Again the government
suffered intense adverse publicity but at a time of no electoral relevance.

Split the headlines

The breaking of the safety net promise illustrated another technique.
Howard made five large announcements together, getting some other bad
news out of the way, and somewhat blurring the public focus. So the Sydney
Morning Herald’s headline (Dodson 2005) ‘Howard unleashes
policy whirlwind’ was the best the Government could have hoped for
as it broke a central promise.

Keep the damage inside the beltway

The Government’s post-election embarrassments all got extensive
media coverage, although at a politically opportune time. More important
on a continuing basis is to reduce the coverage of a negative story by
reducing its newsworthiness, so only the quality media will cover it.
Several abuses of process, for example, are judged too boring for commercial
television and tabloid newspapers.

After gaining the Senate majority in July 2005, Howard’s public
posture was one of modesty, with promises not to abuse the power. When
Senator McGauran ‘gave the finger’ to opposition fingers,
the Prime Minister rebuked him (but had forgiven him by the time he defected
from the Nationals to the Liberals the following January). However, the
next six months included what columnist Glenn Milne called ‘the
worst trashing of the Senate I’ve witnessed in 20 years of covering
federal politics’. Often senators were only given large and complex
pieces of legislation just before they were to be debated, with the government
using its numbers to rush through what it wanted’. The Senate gag
has been used more often since July 1 than it was in the first nine years
of the Howard Government: 10 times against nine times’ (Milne 2005).

According to Michelle Grattan (2005b) the Government was not worried
that its rushing legislation through the Senate would get any public traction:
‘In the Washington phrase the Government likes to use when distinguishing
between “elite” and “punter” views—it’s
mostly those “inside the beltway” who are worried. The Government
can be pretty confident that while the critics will be noisy, suburbia
won’t be swayed’.

Howard has a keen sense of how to prevent a potential embarrassment from
becoming a damaging headline. In February 2005 the Government was under
attack on two issues. One was that in the lead up to the election it had
given a $660,000 grant to the Beaudesert Rail Association, in a Queensland
marginal seat, even though it ‘was crippled by debt and trading
while insolvent’ (Price 2005). The other was the admission on Four
Corners by senior Government scientist Rod Barton that he had personally
interrogated prisoners while in Iraq. This directly contradicted Government
claims that no Australians had been involved in interrogations. On February
15, the Opposition directed nine questions at the Prime Minister, four
on Iraq and five on the improper Queensland grant. Howard managed not
to give a substantial answer to any of them’ (Price 2005). By the
end of the interrogation, Howard was struggling to repress a giggle as
non-answer followed non-answer’. To those few viewing Question Time
on television, and to the press gallery, his evasions looked ridiculous.
However he achieved his aim of keeping his responses and hence the issues
off the front pages and the television news. Only columnist Matt Price
(2005) directly commented on his evasions.

Stonewalling

The Prime Minister has clearly
decided there will be no scalps, and no admissions of major
wrong doing.

The Prime Minister’s stonewalling during this Question Time was
only one example of a much more general strategy. This strategy is based
on the view that once there are no fresh developments to feed a negative
story, news attention will pass on, and the critics’ charges will
run out of steam.

The Government’s adoption of this strategy is most clearly seen
in the matter of ministerial resignations. In the first eighteen months
of the Howard Government, after he had proudly proclaimed his Ministerial
Code of Conduct, more ministers (five) resigned due to scandals than in
any previous Australian government (Tiffen 1999, p. 164). Since then not
one Minister has resigned. Whatever the immediate heat of the controversy,
the Prime Minister has clearly decided there will be no scalps, and no
admissions of major wrong doing. The Palmer Report, which followed the
disclosures of the treatment of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez, said
it had 200 cases of mistreatment referred to it, and included trenchant
criticism of the culture in the Department of Immigration and Multicultural
Affairs. The Government, however, did not hold the Minister for Immigration
responsible and require his resignation.

Controlling the pace and tone of an interview

The Prime Minister has become increasingly effective when being interviewed
about a difficult subject. He is the master of ponderous prose, blunting
the sharpness of a charge with the tone and length of his response. The
resulting circumlocutions probably do not win him any converts, but are
often effective at damage limitation. For example, when 7.30 Report presenter Kerry O’Brien was quizzing him (Australian Broadcasting
Corporation 2005) about what he had learnt following the furore over the
appointment of Robert Gerard to the Reserve Bank Board, he began by saying
‘I guess in political life it’s always wrong to say you haven’t
learnt anything …’ before going into a long rambling talk
about procedures in appointments. In effect his answer amounted to ‘no’,
and no admission of any weaknesses, but there was no sense of aggression
or arrogance in the way he defused the direct question.

Note how Howard has handled the lack of any evidence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, despite the frequent, vociferous and certain claims
about their existence by government ministers before the invasion. Three
months after the invasion, on 11 June 2003, he was interviewed by Tony
Jones on ABC TV’s Lateline:

Q: Does it matter if no weapons of mass destruction are found?

JH: Oh I wouldn’t say it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t
say that at all. And it’s too early to make a judgement. I mean,
people should be more patient.

Q: … If none are found what are the implications?

JH: I think, Tony, that question should be asked and I’d be very
happy to answer it if, after the elapse of a reasonable amount of time,
such a conclusion is reached. But it’s too early, there are too
many sensitive sites, the international team of 1,300 or 1,400 is only
now being assembled. It is altogether too early for people to say, well
there definitely haven’t been and won’t be any evidence
found that Iraq had a WMD capacity before the war started. Those are
issues that obviously I’ll be asked about, if those things happen
…

It is rare for such a momentous
enterprise as waging a war to be shown to rest upon a fiction.

Almost a year later in an interview with Channel Seven’s Chris
Reason on Sunday Sunrise (Channel Seven 2004), ‘a
reasonable amount of time’ had apparently still not elapsed.

Q: Is it time to admit there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction?

JH: No, I’m not willing to admit that. I saw a lot of intelligence
before the war started and I was satisfied with that intelligence.

Q: It wasn’t good intelligence was it …

JH: There were a number of sources of that intelligence, which I’m
not going to go into. I was satisfied with it and so was Mr Blair and
so was President Bush. Until all of the work has been completed I’m
not going to totally sign off on the issue, but whatever the circumstances
were a year ago, we have to deal with a current situation and if we
cut and run, as Labor wants us to do, we’ll deliver an enormous
win to the terrorists.

The previous January, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay—who
had been a leading proponent of the view that Saddam had WMD—had
resigned. Kay publicly professed that ‘we were nearly all wrong’,
and that he was satisfied there were no WMD in Iraq (Blix 2005). Nevertheless
five months later, John Howard could still say ‘The work of the
Iraq Survey Group will go on for some time. I am not going to put a limit
on it’ (Channel Seven 2004).

Robert Garran (2005, p. 5) has recounted that one day in February 2004
the Prime Minister was pushed further by two reporters who asked in separate
interviews whether he would have supported war knowing Iraq’s capability
in weapons of mass destruction was negligible’. That is the ultimate
hypothetical question … Frankly that is an absurdly hypothetical
question’. Garran judged that apparently the political cost of admitting
either alternative would be too great. In the interview quoted above,
Tony Jones also posed the question of the war’s justification in
the absence of Saddam’s WMD:

Q: The problem is if none are found, doesn’t that retrospectively
make the war illegal?

JH: No it doesn’t. The legal justification for the war, our entry
into the war, was the failure of Iraq to comply with the resolutions
of the Security Council—that was our legal justification.

This phrase—repeated in many interviews in the last few years—conveniently
overlooks that none of the relevant UN officials thought such a course
should be taken, and that the weapons inspectors in the immediate lead-up
to the invasion were praising the degree of Iraqi co-operation. Nevertheless
I have not heard Howard’s formulation ever followed up or challenged
by an interviewer.

It is unlikely many members of
the press gallery read the key conclusion.

It is rare for such a momentous enterprise as waging a war to be shown
to rest upon a fiction, such as happened in the case of Iraq. However
Howard has deflected the quest for retrospective accountability with as
little damage as one could expect in such a situation. As the Prime Minister
has said many times, ‘In the end all of these things involve questions
of judgement’ (Barker 2003, p. 14).

Shaping expectations

The Howard Government has also been a master of defusing bad news by
shaping expectations and then having a simple line of defence, whether
or not it matches the evidence. The technique was seen most graphically
in the release of the Jull Report, a bipartisan parliamentary committee
inquiring into the pre-war intelligence regarding Iraqi WMD (Parliamentary
Joint Committee on ASIO 2004). The report was released on 1 March 2004,
but the Government started preparing the ground with a mid-February leak
to Tom Allard of the Sydney Morning Herald. It seems that missing
from the text that Allard saw was the critical section on the way the
Government had used the intelligence available to it. Allard (2004) wrote
‘there appeared to be no systematic doctoring of intelligence by
Australia’s political leaders before the Iraq war’. However
he adds the ‘intelligence services do not get off so lightly’.
The same day as Allard’s story, according to Peter Browne, a ‘much
less nuanced account’ went out through the news agency AAP, under
the headline ‘Iraq report expected to clear Government’.

By the time the report appeared two weeks later, the Government had successfully
focused expectations on the performance of the two major intelligence
assessment agencies, and about the recommendation that there be a further
inquiry into the adequacy of the intelligence agencies.

On the day of its release, several news organisations proclaimed that
the report had cleared the Government. Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander
Downer, declared that the report ‘vindicated’ the Government—his
own conclusion not the Report’s. The Prime Minister concentrated
on the finding that the Australian Government’s argument for war
‘was more moderate and more measured’ than those of the British
and American governments (Browne 2004).

It is unlikely many members of the press gallery read the key conclusion,
which was to be found on page 93. Given the bipartisan nature of the committee
with a Liberal chair, it is extremely strong:

Therefore the case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD
in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the
region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq’s
WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations. This is not the picture
that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to
the Committee by Australia’s two analytical agencies (Parliamentary
Joint Committee on ASIO 2004).

This criticism though only gradually filtered into news reports and was
much less of a focus than the Government’s preferred themes—a
classic case of engineering expectations and directing media attention.

Reframing an issue or question

Howard is not the flashiest batsman
but is a champion at occupying the crease.

All politicians become adept at answering questions on their own terms
rather than being forced into the categories or frames that the interviewer
wants. In responding to events, especially negative events, some politicians
are able to transcend even the logic which seems imposed by their nature.
Note the comment by The Age’s Shaun Carney (2005) on Howard’s
response to the violence in Cronulla:

John Howard does not say anything casually. And what he said was calibrated
and delivered with incredible finesse. … In his opening statement,
the Prime Minister had said: “I think it’s important that
we do not rush to judgement about these events. I do not accept that
there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more
optimistic view of the character of the Australian people.” …
With just a few sentences he converted a difficult situation, one that
a conventional politician might have thought required strong, highly
critical talk about elements of the society, into a positive message
about the good nature of the Australian people—not most of us,
or the vast majority, but all of us. My friend in Sydney said that was
exactly what his neighbours, the mums and dads of the Cronulla rioters,
wanted to hear.

When elected in 1996, Howard said he wanted the Australian people to
be relaxed and comfortable. His response to the Cronulla violence shows
how good he is at making Australians feel relaxed and comfortable about
themselves, even in the face of adverse developments.

CONCLUSION

The many stages of John Howard’s career and his wildly fluctuating
political fortunes suggest the need for caution in generalising about
his political style and its effectiveness. In particular, he has been
much more successful in his political tactics in government than in his
first stint as opposition leader. And he has been far more successful
since 2001 than before, transformed by mysterious political alchemy from
‘little Johnnie Howard’ into a ‘man of steel’.
Part of the reason for his continuing electoral success as Prime Minister
has been his skilful agenda management and his defensive skills in news
management.

So to employ a cricket analogy, Howard’s innings are not marked
by impressive and attractive stroke play. He is not the flashiest batsman
but is a champion at occupying the crease. Even when beaten by powerful
attacks, and occasionally made to look awkward, he is good at keeping
his wicket intact. He has clearly earned the soubriquet, the Geoffrey
Boycott of Australian politics.

Rodney Tiffen is Professor in the Discipline
of Government and International Relations at The University of Sydney.
Professor Tiffen is one of Australia’s leading scholars of the media.
He is author of Diplomatic Deceits: Government, Media and East
Timor (UNSW Press 2001); Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption
in Contemporary Australia (UNSW Press 1999); News and Power (Allen
& Unwin, 1989); and The News from Southeast Asia: The Sociology
of Newsmaking (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1978) and numerous
articles on mass media and Australian politics.